San Marcos tackling 'mini-dorm' issue before it starts

SAN MARCOS - City officials are taking steps to prevent people
from buying up single-family homes near rapidly growing Cal State
San Marcos and turning them into miniature dormitories where a
dozen or more students might live, play loud music and have
late-night parties.

City Manager Paul Malone said last week that the city was
exploring ordinances and other regulations that could spare
neighborhoods near the university the kind of controversy facing
many communities near San Diego State University, where hundreds of
the so-called mini-dorms have sprouted up in recent years.

While mini-dorms are unlikely to become a major problem in San
Marcos any time soon, city and university officials said they could
be common two decades from now when enrollment at the university
climbs from the current 8,700 to a projected 25,000.

"It's a question of getting ahead of the curve, rather than
playing catch-up," said Malone, explaining that San Diego officials
have expressed regret that they didn't make laws governing
mini-dorms a long time ago. "Our antenna are up on this issue."

Any new ordinances would affect the entire city, but city
officials said the neighborhoods most ripe for mini-dorm
conversions are Discovery Hills, just west of the campus, the
Barham area east of the campus and the area between the campus and
Highway 78.

Councilman Hal Martin said the 3,400-home San Elijo Hills
development could also conceivably find itself facing the mini-dorm
problem because, he said, its proximity to the southern edge of
campus might trump the fact that its homes are larger and more
difficult to remodel into mini-dorms.

"The school's growing quickly, so we need to be on top of this,"
said Martin.

The mayor of San Marcos, Jim Desmond, noted that there are
already parking problems near the university, so he said it makes
sense for the city to put laws in place that will help residents
living nearby.

"We want to be accommodating to the university, but we have to
make sure we don't sacrifice neighborhoods in the process," said
Desmond.

An ordinance preventing mini-dorms in the city would also affect
the area around Palomar College's main campus in San Marcos, where
enrollment is expected to jump from about 19,000 to about 30,000 in
the next two decades.

While most community college students commute to campus, Desmond
said, there are already parking issues near Palomar and that
mini-dorms could be a problem down the road.

Noise and parties

Residents living near San Diego State have complained that
mini-dorms bring loud music, parking on paved-over lawns and
late-night parties that are incompatible with residential
neighborhoods.

A handful of entrepreneurs have bought and converted hundreds of
single-family homes near San Diego State, according to that
university. Some have added extra bedrooms by extending houses
further into backyards, while others have just added new walls
inside an existing house.

Officials at Cal State San Marcos said they receive very few
complaints about the hundreds of university students who live in
off-campus apartments and houses. And they said the university
coaches students on being good neighbors during new student
orientations each summer.

But Dilcie Perez, interim director of student life and
leadership, said some students base their decision to live
off-campus on the perception that there will be fewer rules and
regulations than in the University Village dorms, which opened in
2003.

"Students sometimes think apartments have no rules," said Perez.
"We have to explain to them that unless they are in an unusual
complex they won't be able to stay up all night long making
noise."

A housing demand-survey recently completed by the university
showed that most students, especially those from outside North
County, wanted to live on campus during their first year at the
school, according to Bridget Blanshan, interim dean of
students.

Unfortunately, the university does not have enough dorm rooms to
meet current demand, she said, let alone the future demand when
enrollment is expected to triple in the next two decades.

Supply and demand

The demand study indicated that about 1,300 on-campus beds are
currently needed, while University Village has only 645 spaces,
according to Marti Gray, executive director of the university
foundation.

Plans call for a second set of dorms to be built in 2009 or
2010, and possibly two more sets of dorms far into the future, said
Gray. But each complex will have roughly 700 beds, so the total
number of students who could live on campus would be no more than
3,000.

Gray said that number fits with a university goal to house about
15 percent of the student body on campus when the school reaches
full size, but that still leaves 85 percent of students searching
for off-campus housing or commuting from North County, the San
Diego area or Southwest Riverside County.

And university officials said housing demand is likely to
increase even more rapidly than enrollment because campus
admissions officials have begun recruiting more aggressively in Los
Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties.

This year, for the first time since the university was founded
in 1990, a majority of the student body hails from outside North
County.

San Diego State provides on-campus housing for 3,800 of its
33,000 students, a ratio of 11.5 percent, so Cal State San Marcos
expects to be slightly better off than its sister campus to the
south when it comes to meeting student demand for on-campus
housing.

An appealing option

A handful of students living in the Barham Villas apartment
complex, which is on Barham Road less than a mile from campus, said
in interviews last week that mini-dorms seem like a more appealing
option than apartments.

"I think that would be appealing to some people, and personally,
I think it would be sweet to live in a place like that," said Jaci
Spencer, a 20-year-old sophomore. "You'd have a yard and you'd be
living with a bunch of your friends."

But Spencer said she could empathize with residents living near
mini-dorms. She said that some of her neighbors in Barham Villas
are university students who keep odd hours and make quite a bit of
noise.

Spencer, who grew up in San Diego, said she left the university
dorms after her freshman year because of cost, not because of
onerous regulations.

"I left the dorms because they were trying to make room for more
students," said Spencer, referring to extra beds that were
installed last summer to meet growing demand. "This place ended up
being a lot cheaper for me and my three roommates than staying in
the dorms."

Bill Rhein, another Barham Villas resident, said many students
already try to find houses so that they can live with a larger
group of friends than an apartment can accommodate. He said they
are also attracted to the extra privacy and the independent feeling
of living in a house.

"It's great because everyone gets their own room and there's
lots of space," Rhein said.

Rhein said it sounds as if mini-dorms would offer similar
benefits, depending on how the remodeling was handled.

Enforcement and zoning

Malone, the city manager, said constitutional issues might be a
hurdle in preventing mini-dorms in San Marcos, because cities are
prohibited from limiting occupancy in a house when a family decides
to have an unusually large number of children.

He said such problems, which the city attorney will explore in
the near future, might force the city to rely on parking
restrictions or other regulatory methods to combat the
mini-dorms.

Malone said the city might also consider re-shaping the land use
plan for the area around the campus, if housing demand turns out to
be higher than projections made when the university was first
founded.

At that time, the city agreed to provide apartments and other
student-appropriate housing for 25 percent of the student body
within a mile of campus.

"It's still predominantly a commuter campus, but we need to take
a look at what the trends are," said Malone. "If the statistical
assumptions from before turn out to be untrue, then we may have to
make changes."

Blanshan said the university is pleased to have such an
open-minded partner in the city.

"I think it's wonderful that Paul Malone understands the growth
pattern that we are on, and that he wants to be ahead of the
curve," said Blanshan.